Dev Question: Making the sort button better

Hi guys, I've got a question I'd like feedback on. I want to improve the way the inventory sort button works. (We'll eventually have more sorting options for inventory, with a little drop-down menu so that you can sort by e.g. item value or item name. But even when we have multiple sorts, we'll still have a default "smart sort" option, which is what the current sort will become. So I want this smart sort to be as smart as it can be!)

The current sort hasn't been updated much since it was added in pre-alpha two years ago. It's definitely got some weird stuff in it, and some weird ordering, and that can be very frustrating when you're trying to find stuff. So if you have suggestions on how to improve it, please share! I'll incorporate your suggestions when I update the sort logic.

Here's the current way the sorting works:

• First comes helmets. If you have multiple helmets, the currently-equipped one comes first, then the ones with highest rarity, and further sorted by item value. Broken helmets come last.
• Then come chest armor, sub-sorted in the same way.
• Then leg armor
• Then hand armor
• Feet armor
• Main-hand weapons
• Off-hand weapons
• Necklaces
• Rings
• Belts
• Racial jewelry (all of these equipment categories are sub-sorted in the same way as helmets)
• Next come "kits": first aid kits, then armor patching kits
• Next are healing potions
• Next are cheese
• Next are other prepared food
• Next are decoctions
• Next are other alchemy potions
• Next are Bottled items
• Magic oils
• Poisons
• Dyes
• Arrows (sub-categorized by regular, then barbed, then long, then dense, then reservoir, then snare)
• Fletching stuff
• Augments
• Augment-related stuff (phlogiston etc)
• Magic dusts (e.g. fire dust)
• Maps (sub-sorted by motherlode, mineral, mining)
• Treasure clues
• Treasure maps
• Recipes
• Work orders
• Other documents
• Tools
• Armor stakes
• Crystals and gems (sub-sorted only by crystal value atm)
• Metal slabs
• Leather rolls
• Tannin
• Flawless skins
• Other skins
• Textiles
• Wood
• Carpentry items (sub-sorted by barrels, stools, benches, chairs, storage crates, other furniture, then misc carpentry)
• Flowers
• Plants
• Seeds
• Skulls
• Other Bones
• Body Organs and corpse trophies
• Gadgets (e.g. vending machines)
• Grass
• Skill ingredients not yet covered (such as inks, papers, metal slabs(?))
• Recipe ingredients not yet covered (anything else that can go in a recipe)
• Fish
• Meat
• Herbs
• Other vegetables
• Other ingredients (?)
• Figurines
• Game chips
• Coins and moneybags
• "Vendor trash"

So just typing that out I see some weird stuff. Items can only be in one bucket in this list, and they go into the first bucket that matches. So the item "Evil Grass" could theoretically fit into the "grass" category, the "recipe ingredients" category, and possibly the herbs category -- whichever one comes first is the one they get sorted into. Since the "grass" category comes first, that's where they go. And that's correct! (Although the grass category should probably be sorted closer to the flowers and plants...)

But it's a problem with fish, meat, and vegetables -- those categories come AFTER "recipe ingredients not yet covered", which means most raw ingredients fall into "recipe ingredients not yet covered", so your meat and fish and veggies are all intermixed (sub-sorted by item value). The only thing in the "meat" category is meat that isn't used in any recipe yet!

I'm already fixing this for the next update: I'm moving the "skill ingredients not yet covered" and "recipe ingredients not yet covered" categories to be below "other ingredients". And I'm moving the "grass" category to be right below "seeds".

So how can I make this work better? Are there new categories of items we should add to the list? Should things be reordered?

Again, this isn't "what kinds of different sorts do you want" -- that will come later. Right now I want to make the smart-sort button less stupid.

I realize this is a tricky somewhat-technical topic. If the above list makes your eyes water, just let me know when the sorting doesn't work for you: "I want to find my snacks, but they're sorted in with the meals", for instance. Whatever makes you go "wtf" when you're trying to find stuff.

I won't be able to make everyone happy -- a single sort can only be so useful -- but it can definitely be improved!

Super simplistic to begin with, I would appreciate an option which allows me to designate my containers, in any order of my choosing. The first obviously being the catch all, but from there I could designate bag 2 as armor/weapons, bag 3 as consumables, bag 4 as crafting ingredients, etc. Hitting the sort button would then at least move the items into each appropriate bag.

Of course, one could just cut out the middle man and the items fall into their appropriate bags without the need to sort, but I do like the idea of having a bag that things pop into initially just so I can easily locate what it was that I initially looted/won/etc.

That sounds complicated but imma go with sort all ores gold iridum ect and metalworks slabs side by side to eachother also cotton would go next to cotton but would be next to other plants even you cant plant them like mandrakes after that fruits will go next to each other regardless a but they would be next to all the other none plan-table plants or like mandrake that and yarn for tailoring would be side by side none farmable/plantable thread would be next to thread but cloth would be after thread just to make life easier


Maybe later add dividers we can make in storage where there color coded so only the items you set for that divider can go in it in the order or way you want it

Ps. Sorry if the explanation was hard to understand I tried phrasing it as simple as possible but inless we were to get on discord together I would have a hard time explaining it with words, it would be like explaining the whole transmition and augemention system to a new player

Also prefably as a high level play I would like food and potions in the first few rows because I put all my gear in bag 2 so I dont do something stupid and accidently phlog it

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Originally Posted by spider91301

That sounds complicated but imma go with sort all ores gold iridum ect and metalworks slabs side by side to eachother also cotton would go next to cotton

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This would've been enough for me.

I'm Quite happy with how it works currently to be honest.
The only thing I do change is on my gear section I move the items with pockets to the top of there folder so I can add Inv space quickly by just changing 1 item.

Also I think Inv sort does all folders, would perhaps be better to be able to do individual folder sort or maybe have a folder lock.
I guess the ability to mark stuff as unmovable would help some.
The way recipes/scrolls are sorted could be better also. by that I mean keeping all the same type together i.e numerical order flamestrike,flamestrike 2 etc rather than what we currently have.

Off topic,
Would like an option in Recipes/Notoriety to be able to tell whats missing. Even if its an Npc that end game players have to pay to tell you what gourmand,missing recipes and notoriety things you are yet to find/learn.

Also would like the main skills page to have an option to have skill lvls visible on the main skills list rather than having to go inside each skill to find your lvl.

Would like ability to sort recipes within crafting by lvl as well as alphabetically. For trade skills like shaman which I seldom lvl it would help.

Having recipes that have never been used visible also would help when trying to get the exp bonus.Also would like to know if you use a recipe for first time but are at soft lvl cap do you lose the exp boost for first use?

I think would be better if you left the current sort button as is and maybe give us a way to save a sort set up, we all have our own way to set up bags and being able to save the way we want it would be awesome. Thanks for all keep up the good work!

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Originally Posted by INXS

I think would be better if you left the current sort button as is and maybe give us a way to save a sort set up, we all have our own way to set up bags and being able to save the way we want it would be awesome. Thanks for all keep up the good work!

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Leave it as is? But he adds and changes items all the time, hence, where they go in the sort needs to be added into the game. So he can't 'leave it' unless you want the sort to be 'as things were added to the game'.

@Citan I certainly think I'd rather have sort work by source; not by what they're used in. That's decent enough. So evil grass would be a grass, weird metal is a metal, weird stones are a gem, etc. I'd put grasses and flowers next to each other, though.

Although the idea to be able to mark bags as belonging to some subset in the sort would be really handy - Right now I have my armor and tools in one bag, raw ingredients in the next, and stacks of things I'm trying to vendor in the last.

I'd still like a button to combine stacks into a vault-container so I don't have to go searching for where those stacks are in my inventory. I'm always forgetting I found a rare item I'm stacking for raising a side skill (I hate you alchemy ^-^) when I was out. And then I realize I didn't vault one to five items when I'm out gathering again...

My suggestion:

. Equipped gear, sorted by slot
. Loadout gear, sorted by loadout, then slot
. Broken gear, sorted by slot
. All items used by an ability immediately available (current combat skills, sidebar) such as kits, potions, arrows, diamonds... Unsorted, i.e. the current order isn't changed.
. All meals, sorted by required gourmand level
. All snacks, sorted by required gourmand level
. All books and scrolls
. Skill ingredients not yet covered (skill not selected, insufficient level...)
. Recipe ingredients not yet covered (anything else that can go in a recipe)

After that, nothing really making sense comes to mind. Maybe someone else will also suggest something and it can be combined.

One kind of item that I definitely notice sorts poorly are mushrooms. If you have an inventory with many kinds of mushrooms and try to auto-sort, they end up all over the place! It seems like it's entirely because mushrooms have many different uses, so they get scattered around depending on whether the game thinks they're just mushrooms without any use, cooking ingredients or alchemy ingredients. I definitely think in this scenario it would be much easier if all mushrooms got lumped together.

Perhaps after consumable items and such, items could be sorted by their "Main type", like for example all vegetables from gardening would be lumped together, regardless of what kind of recipes they are used for, and then all mushrooms, then all metals, etc.

https://i.imgur.com/wv2WakG.png

I would like the same type of things to be together as others have talked about. Here you can see spider silk (first the purple one, then green, then yellow, then pink, then blue, then the normal). They should all be in a row together. Likewise with the different types of cloth.

https://i.imgur.com/zaoSiGc.png

Mushrooms are the same way. Would be great to have all the mushrooms together followed by all the mushroom powders together, or even better if the mushroom powders and suspensions were placed after their matching mushroom. I would love flowers and seeds to be sorted the same way.

I'm quite happy with the existing sort, really. There are a few hiccups I run into which have mostly been mentioned already:

- Assuming that "tools" means shovels, skinning knives, butcher knives, etc, I'd really prefer to have those sorted right after the equipment since I'd never want to sell mine or change mine, and I'd prefer not having them mixed in with random stuff I may pick up. I have actually accidentally vendored or bank-stored multiple autopsy kits because they looked like random junk documents and sorted close to the random junk documents...

- Using the same "I wouldn't want to sell this" reasoning, I'd probably move arrows up in the sort order, although the arrow icon is distinctive enough that accidentally dumping them is not really an issue.

- Food. I'd prefer not having a separate category for cheese and either have just have a single "prepared food" category, or a "meals" category and a "snack" category, with cheese included in either as appropriate. If food value doesn't correspond to level, I'd like to have it sorted by meal level.
I wouldn't mind sorting fruit and other non-prepared edible items in with the prepared foods since sometimes I'm just looking for "anything I can eat", but I'm fine leaving them where they are, too.

- In general, I'd prefer sorting items by level rather than value. I'm not sure if that's worth any dev effort though since 99% of the time value corresponds to level. I mostly run into level sorting issues on my recipe alt where I have a bunch of similar-looking items in my inventory, and I have no idea what the value of a level 30 cooking scroll vs the value of a level 60 tailoring scroll is. It would help me to either have the recipes sub-grouped entirely by skill or really just by level since a level sort would allow me to tell when I'm getting close to what I'm looking for. Since we are not supposed to hoard, I'm not sure how valid this scenario is though. :)

I am also fairly content with the current sort order.

There are two things I would like changed though:

1. Sort equipment by Loadout where possible (I note that the same item can be used in multiple Loadouts, so some decision logic is required e.g. by load out number?)
2. When multiple stacks of the same item are held in inventory, sort by the least quantity first.

Many thanks for the opportunity to provide feedback :)

It would've been nice to be able to make items unsellable, i've very often sold items by mistake.

Current sorting is decent, but like others said, it is frustrating when similar item types don't group together. The biggest kicker for me is the icons as they change every few updates, and always seem to have multiple different items with the same icon (ie: toxic ice sludge, toxic sludge, ectoplasm, etc. right now). That makes the sort kind of useless since I need to manually check all of the matching icons after/while memorizing what the new art corresponds to.

I don't think it has been mentioned yet, but it would be cool to sort vendor 'Used' tabs too by price, item type, whatever.... sometimes I just want to buy lots of one item and would save some time if I could reduce scrolling through large lists (like Joeh).

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Originally Posted by Lyramis

Would be great to have all the mushrooms together followed by all the mushroom powders together, or even better if the mushroom powders and suspensions were placed after their matching mushroom. I would love flowers and seeds to be sorted the same way.

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This is a great idea too! I often manually sort my storage so that powders/suspensions follow the corresponding mushroom, same with wood/perfect wood/chips, flowers/seeds, skins/rolls, etc.

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Originally Posted by Lyramis

Mushrooms are the same way. Would be great to have all the mushrooms together followed by all the mushroom powders together, or even better if the mushroom powders and suspensions were placed after their matching mushroom. I would love flowers and seeds to be sorted the same way.

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Fking hell yes

Relaying a couple comments from my husband who is apparently not going to make his own forum account:

He'd prefer to group items by type, rather than usage. For example, he'd like to have all the mushrooms grouped together, rather than have them be sorted based on their trade skill use.

He'd also like organizer tabs in storage, similar to the way the current inventory folders work. His example there was that he had several gear sets stored on the same NPC and he wanted to have a separate tab for each gear set, so that the items for different combat skills aren't all mixed together. That's less of an issue for him now since he started storing gear for only 1-2 combat skill combos per NPCS, so there is less chance of them getting mixed up. (I'm saying "gear sets" here rather than "loadouts" since, at least for me, I have more gear sets than loadout slots.)

Personally I do not think you are going to make everyone happy with sort. I just use it to group things together. The icons and numbers on them can make it hard to find items. For me, I would actually prefer a 'filter' textbox at top of storage rather than sort. You simply start typing text, and and anything that does not match gets 'greyed out /dimmed. Could be simply by name but might include description etc. It would make it far easier for me to find things... which I guess is the idea behind sort?